Colin Devroe knows what he likes and doesn’t like about Mail.app, although he says that “I’m not as much of a power-user of Mail as I probably could be.”

He has produced a list of gripes and a modest list of wishes for Leopard Mail.

I see what he means when he asks for more flexible searching:

The search box should allow for multiple filters such as you find in the current Finder. Searching for a subject, then being able to click + to drill down until you find what you are looking for. I have about 12,500 pieces of email, and finding the 1 that I am looking for can sometimes prove difficult with a single search filter.

It would be great at the click of a Finder-like plus sign to search for emails from a particular sender with a particular word in the subject line:

That’s much easier than the Boolean search “hack” for Mail.

The complaint about smart mailboxes is also right on target. And well-observed; I’d not noticed it before.

When you create a smart mailbox and select “message is in mailbox” you get a list of your existing smart mailboxes. When you try to create a “message is not in mailbox” criterion, you don’t. Why not? He wants it fixed.

His modest feature requests — an iLife media browser and the automatic compression of multiple attachments — are not what I would choose, but it’s great to see someone thinking outside the box and coming up with features that add functionality not just eye-candy.

A fine post.mail.app, apple mail, bugs, leopard mail, smart mailboxes, searching, media browswer, attachments

The owner of rtfa.net has posted a list of the things that are annoying, broken or just plain scandalous about Mail.app.

He is an unhappy Apple Mail user: “Well, if Thunderbird integrated with spotlight and OSX address book, it’d be a no-brainer. However, I’m entrenched.”

And life in the trenches with Mail.app is not good.

Three problems score the highest scandal rating — incorrect treatment of IMAP’s “seen flag”, the “lost message” problem and the “invalid pointer” problem.mail.app apple mail, bugs, problems, IMAP, flags, attachments, SSL, encryption, lost messages

Apple has updated its technote on dealing with winmail.dat files.

After pointing out that winmail.dat files the result of emails containing rich text information sent “from a Microsoft email application (such as Outlook and the Microsoft Exchange Client)”, the technote advises:

To avoid seeing these attachments in the future, you ask the sender to deselect the email’s “Send to this recipient in Microsoft rich text format” checkbox or preference setting in mail client before they send the message.

Fortunately more immediate help is at hand.

OMiC is a plugin that can extract the files from a winmal.dat attachment on the fly. Since I last posted about it, it has got smarter.

It no longer uses the Save dialog, but decodes and presents the included files in Mail’s Attachment View:

It also now supports Panther (10.3), winmail.dat files with the wrong MIME type and Outlook’s iCalendar format.

It’s the kind of functionality that should be built-in to Mail.app but isn’t.

OMiC is shareware (5 euros = USD 6.30) and is available from the developer’s web site . If you live in a Windows world, the money will be well worth it.mail.app, apple mail. winmail.dat, outlook, attachments, microsoft exchange, tips, plugins

A poster on the Apple Discussion Boards is having a very weird experience with attachments in his IMAP account.

Dylan Muir finds that when he views large attachments stored on his IMAP server in Mail.app, they are corrupted. If he views them in a webmail client, they aren’t. If he views them in Thunderbird, they aren’t. It’s only Mail.app.

Unusually, the Apple Mail gods on the Discussion Boards seem to be out of ideas.

I wonder if anyone here has experienced this too (I never have), and knows what’s going on.mai.app, apple mail, attachments, imap, corruption, bug

Sooner or later, all Mail.app users who have any kind of email communication with Outlook users will get a message containing the dreaded unopenable winmail.dat file.

TNEF is a utility that extracts the files buried inside. It can really save your bacon.

Now a developer has wrapped the utility into a mail.app bundle which automatically recognises incoming emails with winmail.dat attachments.

When they arrive, it either opens iCal if the embedded file is an Outlook appointment or prompts you to save the embedded files in a folder of your choice:

I don’t get enough email from Outlook users to need it. Firing up TNEF’s Enough app on the odd occasion is all I need.

If you get a lot of this kind of email, the plugin takes out some extra steps and might be worth the shareware price.

OMiC is shareware (5 euros = USD 6.30) and is available from the developer’s web site . He hopes to make some money from the plugin for his compulsory military service, which begins soon.windows, outlook, exchange, winmail.dat, mail.app, apple mail, attachments, ical, files, TNEF enough, plugins

Extensions now exist which offer Thunderbird users some of the rich extra functions provided by Mail.app plugins. Paolo Koasmos has written a collection of excellent extensions and Paul Tomlin’s Quick File gets close to the filing magic offered by Mail Act-on.

Paulo’s AttachmentRemember will catch messages to which you have forgotten to add attachments just like James Eagan’s missing attachments plugin.

Quick file by Paul Tomlin gives filing a tremendous speed boost over the “old drag ‘n’ drop”.

Select a message, hit a user-customizable hotkey (⌃Q works for me), and a dialog appears. Start to type and it offers a list of matching mailboxes that you can navigate through using the arrow keys. It’s quick.

Lastly, Paulo’s ExternalTemplateLoader brings MailTemplate to Thunderbird. It loads an external HTML file as the template for a message or a reply.thunderbird, extensions, filing, templates, attachments, mail.app, apple mail, plugins

James Eagan has updated his AttachmentScanner plugin to make it a universal binary.

This is a clever little plugin for Mail.app which prevents absent-minded people like me from sending emails without first including the attachments they should contain.

As he explains on his site , the universal version is enormous (7.3MB) because it includes a full universal version of Python.

In addition, the plugin now attempts to use the language set in the Spell Checker rather than the default System language. So, if your System language is set to English but your Spell Checker is set to Spanish, it will use the latter to determine if an attachment is present or not.

You can get the plugin (PPC, universal or source code) from his web site .attachments, mail.app, apple mail, plugins, doh!, email, addons